The basic idea to combine images taken from a ground based equipment with images taken from the air by means of for example air planes is inter alia known from U.S. 2008/0221843 A1 and also from an article by Fruhe C. et al “Constructing 3D City Models by Merging Ground-Based and Airborn views” in Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'03).
The solutions according these two references to combine images taken from ground based equipment and images taken from the air are rather complex and involves manual processing of the image information. Furthermore there is no discussion about the complex of problems that arises due to occlusion. Examples of objects causing occlusions as obscuration are obscuration from trees, light poles, cars etc.
It could also be noted that there are available solutions today to build views from images taken from the street and often called “street views”. These solutions are based on images, often covering 360 degrees taken from a known georeferenced location with known directions. By choosing a specific point, e.g. on a map, it is possible to view the environment from this point. No other three dimensional model is created than the interpretation made in the eye of the observer.
It is an object of the invention to obtain a three dimensional model method that is less complicated to carry out, is carried out automatically, can take care of the occlusion complex of problems, and that can build a detailed model of a realistic or real three dimensional world.